====== Listening to multi-channel audio with only two speakers in stereo using mplayer ====== Have you already noticed while listening to multi-channel music with only two stereo speakers with <color orangered>''mplayer''</color>, how the sound is low ? Same thing applies with videos using the <color purple>''AC3''</color> format, often composed of 5 channels. Mplayer, being the swiss-army knife of video players, gives you the tools to deal with multi-channel audio with your two poor laptop speakers. Here's the command-line I use when I have to deal with 5-channel audio files (or videos) : <code> mplayer file.ac3 -channels 5 -af pan=2:'1:0':'0:1':'0.7:0':'0:0.7':'0.5:0.5' </code> The quotes are here only for readability. Here's what this command-line says : * ''-channels 5'' : I want to use the 5 channels of the input file * ''-af pan=2'' : I only have 2 speakers and so only need 2 output channels * ''1:0'' : route the entire front-left input channel to the left output channel * ''0:1'' : route the entire right-left input channel to the right output channel * ''0.7:0'' : lower its volume a bit and route the entire rear-left input channel to the left output channel * ''0:0.7'' : lower its volume a bit and route the entire rear-right input channel to the right output channel * ''0.5:0.5'' : eavenly mix the center input channel into the two output channels, 50% each The resulting left channel will be a mix of : * 100% of the input front-left channel * 70% of the input rear-left channel * 50% of the input center channel Same thing goes for the right channel, just replace all "left" occurences by "right" above ;) If you want to test by yourself, I recommend the use of an AC3 test file, available here : [[http://www.lynnemusic.com/surround.html|5.1 Surround Test File]], thanks to Bjorne Lynne. There are some very nice tunes on this site by the way :)